


"Is She Pretty On The Inside?"

by Melisandre_deWinter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A Song of Ice and Fire References, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - A Song of Ice and Fire Fusion, Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - Game of Thrones Fusion, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blow Jobs, Character Study, Cutting, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Roller Coaster, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Game of Thrones References, Gen, Hair, Happy Ending, Heavy Angst, High School, Inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, Lesbian Character, Minor Robert Baratheon/Cersei Lannister, Modern Era, No Game of Thrones | A Song of Ice and Fire Knowledge Required, Non-Consensual Blow Jobs, Non-Consensual Oral Sex, POV Cersei Lannister, POV Lesbian Character, Photography, Prom, Prom Queen, Rebellion, Rough Oral Sex, Sad with a Happy Ending, Self-Harm, Sexual Assault, Teen Angst, Teenagers, Tywin Lannister Being Tywin Lannister, Tywin Lannister's A+ Parenting, Young Cersei Lannister
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:20:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25897330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melisandre_deWinter/pseuds/Melisandre_deWinter
Summary: "Everyone called her cold. Heartless. Bitch. Sociopath. She wondered if someone who couldn’t feel could experience pain..."A character/psychological study of young Cersei Lannister. Trigger warning for self-harm and sexual assault. Modern AU.
Relationships: Cersei Lannister & Tywin Lannister, Cersei Lannister/Taena Merryweather, Melisandre of Asshai/Cersei Lannister, Robert Baratheon/Cersei Lannister
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	"Is She Pretty On The Inside?"

_Sixteen_

Everyone called her cold. Heartless. Bitch. Sociopath. She wondered if someone who couldn’t feel could experience pain. 

She opened the scissor and snapped it a few times to make sure it was sharp before pressing the edge of its blade to her forearm. Her eyes moved upwards from her forearm to gaze at the reflection in the mirror. Green eyes that pierced her many enemies. Enviably-natural blonde hair falling in long curls over her face and onto her chest. Flat stomach despite all the time she spent drinking when she was supposed to be doing homework. Tanned skin from laying in the sun all summer. The scum who hated her couldn’t deny she was beautiful; that probably made them hate her even more. 

She looked back down and continued to hold the blade onto her forearm. Lightly, at first, then harder. She wanted to see how deeply she could cut herself before it started to hurt. To see how immune to pain she was. 

As blood pooled out from the gash on her arm, she held the edge of the scissor in place, watching the blood drip over her arm and first into the sink, then onto the bathroom floor.

It didn’t hurt.

If she couldn’t feel pain, maybe she truly was the monster everyone said she was. At least then she had an advantage over her weaker inferiors. 

She raised her arm and rubbed it against her mouth. The blood tasted metallic but weirdly good, and stained her hair when she lowered her arm again. Gold smeared with crimson. As blood pooled onto the floor, she looked into the mirror and saw herself smiling. Finally her outside looked as messy as her inside. And then everything went black.

********************************************************

_Seventeen_

He grabbed her hair tightly, at its roots. “Queens serve their king,” Robert grunted, pulling her head to his dick. Her knees were protected by the fabric of her dress as she knelt on the floor, one of his hands pressing her body down as the other grabbed her hair and forced her mouth around his cock. Money was no object to her, so if she of all people realized that this dress was too expensive to get wrinkled and dirty on the floor of the boy’s bathroom handicapped stall, that meant something. A girl was meant to go all-out for her prom dress, and it had been so hard to find one with sleeves that covered the scars on her arm. 

She hadn’t been voted prom queen because she was liked, but because she was feared. No one wanted to endure her wrath if she wasn’t crowned. How could she have known the title came with a price of having to blow the prom king in the dirty bathroom after they were anointed with their titles? “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.” Some English teacher had said that at one point; she couldn’t remember which one since she never paid attention in class. Maybe she should have listened. 

Her head throbbed on the spot where he pulled her hair, which had taken so long to be gathered into an elegant updo. What a waste that effort had been, when her hair had fallen out of it and into his hands, spilling over her face and touching his dick.

When he finally came and pulled his dick out of her mouth, she spat out his cum so fast she didn’t bother to realize it would fall into her hair. Which he then grabbed again to press her face upwards, forcing her eyes to stare into his.

“You’ve already sucked half the dicks in this school; it wasn’t fair to exclude mine, now, was it?” He looked genuinely hurt, and she had to stop herself from laughing out loud at how pathetic he was, at how wrong he was about her.

She’d never sucked a dick before in her life, and never intended to again. The rumors never bothered her; she appreciated anything that added some drama to her reputation. If people knew she had fucked half the cheerleaders and not half the football team like they said, they wouldn’t be scared of her; they’d laugh at her. The last thing she wanted was for anyone to laugh at her. Or to pity her, so she certainly wouldn’t be telling anyone about tonight. 

After he left her in the bathroom stall, she slowly came to her feet. Inspecting her cum-stained hair, she felt slightly nauseous. Usually silky to touch, it felt sticky. 

Washing it under the bathroom sink sufficed for now, although she didn’t know how she’d explain her wet hair and the makeup smeared across her face to everyone else at prom.

So instead of returning to the party, she climbed onto the sink, opened the window, and jumped out. Some horny guy would take pity on a pretty hitchhiker who needed a ride home. 

********************************************************

_Five_

Her mother was beautiful, and they’d looked exactly alike. Her father always paid so much more attention to her brother, but he valued her beauty—if nothing else about her—because it was so reminiscent of her mother’s. She was the closest tie he had to her mother after her death. Only years later did she realize this was why he took what she did so personally. He needed to have a reminder of his wife around, whether or not she wanted to be more than that to him and to the world. And now she looked less like her mother. 

“You fool! How could you ruin yourself?” he shouted into her face. She looked up at him, her eyes glimmering with defiance. She had to lift her neck up so high to stare into his eyes; although everyone was tall to a five-year-old, no one stood taller than her father. 

_It’s just hair_ , she’d thought at the time. Only her mother had ever combed it, not any of the nannies. That was their special time together. After her mother had died, it was constantly tangled because she had so much energy and was always running around, getting into fights with the boys at the playground. No nanny could restrain her. After one of the boys knocked her to the floor after pulling her hair to disarm her, she couldn’t let that happen again, and was sick of combing those long curls by herself anyway. So now they lay on the bathroom floor. 

“I just felt like it,” she said to him. His shouting didn’t scare her. It was more ominous when he spoke quietly, as he did now. “You look disgusting,” he murmured. “No daughter of mine can be seen like this.”

“But your son has short hair, and he’s not disgusting to you. Why would your daughter be?”

He glared at her. Clearly, he wanted her to cry, to beg forgiveness, but she would not give him the pleasure of hearing her beg. 

“Hair grows back,” she told him, although if she was honest with herself, she didn’t want it to. But he made sure it did. He had her locked in her room for a week, only getting one meal a day nervously delivered to her by one of the maids whose names she never bothered to learn, until she apologized. After that, she got her favorite dinner and even dessert for once. Usually she and her brother never had dessert, since Father said it was a bad habit for children to get into. Kissing the ass of the person funding your existence paid off sometimes. She learned then that for as long as she lived under his roof, she had to follow his rules and be the kind of daughter he wanted in order to survive without living in conflict. 

She already waged too many wars inside her own mind to bother constantly battling both with him and with herself. 

********************************************************

_Eighteen_

They lay in bed together, the raven-haired girl twirling her long blonde hair around her finger. “Happy birthday, goldilocks,” Taena said, and she grabbed Taena’s face close to hers for a kiss. A deep one, which she followed by sticking her fingers into Taena, who was already wet.

Of course Taena was wet. Anyone who was lucky enough to be with Cersei would be. 

“Eighteen, you’re an adult now. Only took you a few months to catch up to me.”

“Shut up; you know I’ve been more mature than most adults since I was a kid.”

“Yeah, so mature that you hide me under your bed if daddy’s home.”

She took her fingers out of Taena and raised her hand to slap her instead of pleasuring her, but Taena caught her hand and gripped it tightly. “When are you going to tell him?” she asked solemnly.

“I don’t have to. He doesn’t have any right to know about my private life.”

The more he knew, the worse she’d end up. When she was sixteen, a maid had found her passed out on her bathroom floor, lying in the blood that had poured out from the arm she’d sliced open. When she woke up in that fancy private clinic, there was a note from Father on the desk next to her bed telling her that if she humiliated him again, he’d freeze her access to her bank account. 

He didn’t even have the heart—or the balls—to say it to her face. 

Taena let go of the hand she gripped and walked out of the bed. “Fuck this. You pretend you don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of you by bullying others, but you do that because you’re so afraid of them hurting you. I don’t feel like hiding anymore.”

“And I don’t feel like not having a bank account.”

“Poor little rich girl, having to actually find a way to make money on her own,” Taena sneered at her.

That wasn’t fair. No one got to sneer at her. Only she could do the sneering. At others.

“It’s about more than that. He doesn’t have the right to truly know me.”

“Well then, you don’t have the right to keep fucking me. Or fucking with me. I don’t know which it is anymore,” Taena sighed as she got dressed. “I’ll find someone who isn’t afraid to show others what they feel about me.”

“I have no feelings,” Cersei replied, “get that into your head.” 

If only she had no feelings when she saw Taena with him at the party that night. 

Of all the people to rebound with, why did it have to be Robert?

She watched her lean against him drunkenly, red solo cup in her hand, as he grabbed her around the waist. Did his hand grab more gently now than it did when it grasped the roots of her hair towards his dick on prom night? 

Of course she’d never told Taena about prom night, so it wasn’t as though Taena chose him to spite her, but still. 

It hurt.

Anger felt better than pain, so she stormed up to them and threw the contents of her drink in Taena’s face, and rushed off before she could face any retaliation. 

She wasn’t Goldilocks, like Taena used to call her as a joke, knowing she hated anything cutsey. She was the Big Bad Wolf, with sharp claws.

She was mixing up her fairy tales, but fuck fairy tales anyway. 

********************************************************

_Eighteen and three months_

Flushing the pills from that shrink Father made her see down the toilet was fun for a while, but one day she was so bored that she figured, _why not try them? If the people around me aren’t going to become more interesting, maybe these will make me feel less fed up with everything._

After about three weeks of taking them, she found herself thinking about Taena less often. But that was just time, not the pills. Or was it? Time had never healed any of her past wounds nor made her stop ruminating on ways to hurt those who had hurt her. 

Until now.

Whatever was helping, it felt good to stop thinking about Taena and to start packing for college. She didn’t know what she wanted to major in, since she’d never enjoyed school. Her teachers always shook their heads when returning her exams. “Channeling your cleverness into cruelty won’t get you anywhere,” the principal had said when she was in his office again after yet another parent had complained about her tormenting yet another classmate. “If only you really applied yourself in the right way…”

She would get somewhere—be somebody important—no matter what they said. And not because of having a rich father. On her own. 

********************************************************

_Twenty-eight_

“You look cute in pigtails,” her girlfriend said to her, playfully scratching behind her ears after gathering her blonde hair into two stubby pigtails that stuck out from her head. She wrinkled her nose in frustration. “Cute isn’t my energy.” “You’re right,” Melisandre replied, “more like feral,” and bit her ear. “Was that an _insult_?” she responded with performative petulance, and tackled the other girl to the bed, both girls laughing before her girlfri...fuck, she had to keep reminding herself that now that they were engaged that word didn’t work anymore...leapt out to grab her camera. “Ok, now sit still. Just a few more.” She cocked her head to the right in annoyance and raised an eyebrow, a motion that got captured on film, before taking the pigtails out and shaking her hair around her face, then stretching her arms behind her back. The camera kept on snapping. 

“Everything you do looks like an ad even when you’re not trying. Like yesterday when I snuck up and captured you sitting on the kitchen table with your shoes on? Flagrantly violating my no-shoes-in-the-home rule, but came out like a Vogue cover.” 

“I’m tired of you ambushing me with your camera, and I’m a businesswoman, not your fucking model.”

They both knew she was lying and that she loved the attention, loved being adored. Especially by someone she loved. She felt like a sap when she used the L-word, but it was undeniable after all this time together. Hell, it was undeniable from the moment they’d first locked eyes.

She yanked her fiancée’s long red hair to pull her back into the bed, where they spooned for a while. Melisandre kissed the nape of her neck before finally leaping out of bed. 

“I have to develop my negatives.”

“The perils of dating an artist, always coming second to her work. No one puts me second to anything.” 

“I’ll rush, I promise! I’ll be done in time to shower before we go...but are you really 100% sure?”

“Yes. I’m bringing you as my date to the gala. I told you it was my final decision.”

“Your father…”

“...will deal. And if he doesn’t, I have enough of my own savings to fall back upon.” She almost added “and I don’t care what he thinks,” but stopped herself. Her fiancée always knew when she was lying. 

She’d always care. His glares and harsh words would always hurt, but if she could feel hurt, at least she wasn’t a _totally_ heartless bitch.

And if she could feel pain, that meant she could feel pleasure, too.

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Pretty on the Inside" by Hole
> 
> I thought of this after writing “In The Arms of The Ocean” as a sort-of prequel to explore how Cersei became the person we see in that story. So please read that one!


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